Ah, the inevitable blog on “Online Community Trends in the Upcoming Year” arrives on the BraveNew site! But this year I’m coming up with a twist. Based on my informed observations, the following should be trends in 2017, a year that has already seen many changes in the business landscape. We are living in a new era with a new administration and new rules. One month in, we have seen executive orders and suggested policies with far reaching implications for companies in such industries as healthcare, energy, retail, housing, and travel. Online communities can do so much to help these organizations navigate change in transitional times.

The 2016 US Presidential election with its many twists and turns will be debated for years. Approximately 100,000 votes in two to three states made the difference in the Electoral College. The impact of social media on this election and on those 100, 000 voters will be closely studied in the near future. While it’s still too early to assess the findings of those studies, I can articulate a few of the lessons learned for online knowledge sharing communities.

I believe that I am a better strategist and tactician for BraveNew and our knowledge sharing communities by examining the role of online and offline communities in multiple areas. My awareness of the potential of our communities is sharpened by seeing how other communities foster collaboration and yield new ways of looking at issues in multiple disciplines. Last month, I turned my focus to the role of community in sports.

Not just any sport but the Olympics and its most recent edition, the Summer Games of Rio. Prior to the games, there was plenty of negative coverage on all the potential ills, real and imagined, that might befall the event. But, as has happened before (see: Sochi, London, Salt Lake), once the inspirational marathoner Vanderlei de Lima lit the torch, the criticism (give or take a Ryan Lochte) became muted.

BraveNew the integrated social collaboration platform that enables teams and organizations to share knowledge, announced today it was named a Hot Vendor in Social Collaboration and Work by Aragon Research, a leading technology research and advisory firm.

“We are delighted that BraveNew has been recognized as a Hot Vendor in Social Collaboration and Work by Aragon Research” stated Lucian Tarnowski, CEO and Founder of BraveNew. “Knowledge automation and content curation are important trends in the Fourth Industrial Revolution we are experiencing. The BraveNew platform helps our clients break down knowledge silos and create a culture of scalable learning.”

According to the report “BraveNew is considered a hot vendor, because of its ability to be easily adapted to fit an enterprise’s needs via its community pages and their ability to guide users to the right content and pages in an intuitive manner. BraveNew also offers clients the ability to use machine learning tools to curate contextually relevant content from across the Internet.”